Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.).

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.